Wrapping up my first game

While I could spend a lot more time expanding on my first game, that would go against the guidelines that I have set for myself. I have met all the goals that I had for the game, so it came time to wrap it up and move on. I may come back and tinker more with this game in the future.

Here is what I did to wrap up the game:

Fixed the title screen – Creating the title screen in Game Maker Studio was kind of clunky and overly complex for what I needed for this game. All I needed was something with the game’s name and some instructions. I ended up creating the title screen in Photoshop and just applying it as a background.

New title screen. I am much happier with these results.

Updated the power-up sprites – The old ones looked a bit rough, so I replaced them with ones that I felt were more refined.

Organized the game assets – I created groups for the various subtypes of game assets. Finding things will now be a lot easier. It may not have been needed in a small game like this, but I want to get into the habit so that the more complex games that I make will not get too cluttered.

Cleaned up the code – Good coding practices are important. I went back through all my code and made sure that everything was up to par with how I like my code. I know that everyone who writes code has their preferred styles, so I am not going to go too much into mine (unless people really want me to). I will share one thing that I picked up from the professor who taught my Visual Basic class: comments on closing braces (used to denote the end of certain types of commands and functions). It is quite common to end up with several closing braces, one followed by another. While line breaks and proper spacing helps to keep them organized, putting a comment describing what command the brace belongs to helps even more.

Commenting on closing braces

Now it is time to figure out what I want to do for my next project. I am leaning towards some sort of platforming game. We shall see.